Found footage horror should look a bit ugly.
Not fake-ugly, where every scratch has been polished by a studio boardroom; I mean that sour little mess you get from a phone held too low in a hallway at 12:17 a.m.
That is the point.
If the picture is too clean, my brain starts looking for craft. Nice lighting. Nice blocking. Nice fog machine. The spell gets thin fast.
Bad sound is half the scare
The best part is often not the thing you see.
It is a plastic thump from another room, the camera mic clipping because somebody breathed too close, or one tiny scrape under the floorboards that nobody in the scene wants to name.
But cheap sound does a rude trick. It makes you lean in. Then it punishes you for leaning in.
I watched one of these films years ago on a cracked office chair, with a desk fan rattling near my left knee and one browser tab still open to an unpaid phone bill. It made the movie worse in the best way.
The room matters more than the lore
Give me a rented house with thin walls.
Give me a kitchen where the drawers do not shut right, a sofa with one sunken cushion, and a camera battery that keeps dying at the worst time.
And please, for once, let the ghost have no clean backstory. A name is fine. A date is fine. A dusty newspaper clipping is pushing it.
So much horror gets weaker when it starts tidying itself up. The same thing happens with scary movies after a rough week; the scare often works before anyone can explain it neatly.
Shaky camera is not a free pass
Let us be fair.
A wobbly frame can hide lazy writing. It can also make half the room seasick. Some films seem to think panic means pointing the lens at a shoe for nine minutes.
But when it works, it feels stolen. Like you were not meant to see it. Like the camera is not showing a story; it is trying to survive one.
That is why cheap-looking horror still has teeth.
It does not ask you to admire the monster. It asks whether you heard that noise behind the door.
